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Wait… what?! Fail bear in 4.0.3

So let me set the stage… A few days before that Cataclysm dropped I got my warrior to level 80 (yaah). So I queued for a few runs because I was bored. Most of them were normal mode. Here I am, fresh dinged 80 with no gear to speak up and I got in a couple runs with raiders that were helping an alt get a trinket. One of those runs was a normal PoS run and I think all the DPS were averaging over 5k dps. It was some of the hardest tanking I have done. Why? Because I challenged myself to hold all the agro. Sure those guys could take the hits. I probably could have gone AFK. But nah, I like a challenge. So I tanked it. And while I did not so much ‘hold’ agro, I did juggle it so that most of the critters hit me most of the time. Really I pulled out all the stops, hammered keys, bounced around like crazy, and in the end really impressed myself with what I was able to keep up with.

There is a point to this, and it is not to brag. Right after that I got in a Heroic PoS and, despite again really pulling out all the stops and stretching that little gnome warrior, I just could not get Tyrannous down. At some point you hit a wall of ‘gear’ where the tank can’t take the hits and the healer (who was good but also under geared badly) can’t heal them.

So that is the stage going into Cata. We started leveling our main druid pair first and it went well. I knew bear swipe had been nerfed 20% according to the patch notes. I also knew I was losing my 20% swipe 10 set bonus. Also I knew that healing was nerfed and everything was going to be hard again. All that means I expected it to be somewhat challenging in places, and in places it was.

And then we ran instances. Yep, challenging, very challenge. I marked stuff, our very good DPS friends (like RepGrind) CCed stuff. We usually had good DPS levels. Almost 100% of our runs were with guildies. And it was hard but it went ok. Love the new instances, love the new mechanics, but this post is not really about that. I ran a few runs with another tank in the guild and we did less CC on those. I also ran with one of the other raid leaders and he commented how the other runs he was on they CCed less and stuff. Honestly it really pissed me off. How dare anyone think these Cata runs were easy, they were HARD.

Finally I noticed something…. Some adds were quite simply ignoring my aoe threat. They would run right through it when no one else should have had much threat on them. Hmm.. strange. Maybe I need to get Thrash fired off more often. Maybe move a few abilities around. So I went looking for some macros and stuff. Had to Google around to see how they changed the syntax on a swipe macro…

I checked the numbers they posted against what my meters were saying and it is pretty much right. Bear swipe got somewhere around a 75 to 80 percent nerf.

80% reduction? To swipe? EIGHTY PERCENT??!?!!!

Holy freaking crud no wonder those runs were so dang hard. I have NO AOE threat. How did we even get through those? Why did it take me that long to notice?

Well that last question I could figure out. I had just been on that warrior, for the last few runs before cata. Really compared to those runs it was almost easier. It took me getting my bear to 85 before it really sank in that the runs had been nearly has hard as having the whole party with vastly better gear. I had literally run every other instance in the expansion and was starting the last one (Grim Batol) when I figured this out.

Bears are broken. I hate to say it be they are. Bliz needs to fix this bug ASAP.

Interestingly I had noticed that my ‘how to work your bear in 4.0.1-4.0.3’ post from the other week had been getting a lot of google hits. Now I know why.

For those not yet leveling in Cata who hope Thrash will fix it for you, it will not. It does similar damage levels as swipe, and only adds a tiny little bleed effect. For those of you that are not 85 and were hoping max level would fix the issues for you, it will not.

But hang in there. It IS possible to tank everything here as a bear, you just might need a tiny bit more gear than your pally friends (may they and their three target taunts and their ranged multi target silences and their non-nerfed aoe dps all die horribly in a fire). But you CAN do it. Some of the fights are going to be so hard as to challenge you. Remember to use tab and spread around some other threat besides Swipe. And mark targets for your DPS. If you don’t at least give them a skull to shoot at you will have much much more trouble.

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Low level bears that I have healed (a friend included) have been having the worst time in instances. I really, really hope it gets better.

I don’t recall having this much trouble keeping a bear tank up before 4.0.1. Of course, I don’t see many bears anymore, but when I do, holy crap, to go from full health to dead in a matter of 1-2 seconds is too much! (And this is a tank with blue gear and a few greens, no shmancy BOA’s)

Aggro is a problem, their squishiness is a problem, my mana is a problem. /sigh

I’m trying really hard to do well on my priest, but low level right now is so tough.

(And on a side note, I’ve played a disc priest to 80 before, as well as all other healing classes, except a paladin, so I am not new to the disco-bubble scene, or how to heal different tanks)

My perspective might be screwed but although a bear tank is what I run with the most, and so feel the most comfortable with, it just seems like I don’t see many bears out there. Other than Reversion, all the druids I know are resto and/or dps players.

The health pools at 85, even in basic greens, are pretty decent and Reversion is amazing with cooldowns so it’s not a problem there but I see how it could be. I think it could be similar to DK tanks, where if they’re good and use cooldowns they are very solid but if they don’t use cooldowns they are really squishy.

With marking skull and X, and having trash, I don’t have many problems, unless the dps start with heavy AoE, or the healer decides to leave me at 2k hp from max hp and puts a HoT on me during my pull.

I don’t have tanking experience at 81 and up with other classes, but my 79 DK tank is a AoE tanking God compared to how my druid feels and to be honest I don’t think that this will change much when I get him to the new dungeons in cataclysm.

When doing normal runs on my mage with either the warrior or dk tanking guildies the failings of bears are noticeble. I can start AoE whenever I want and hit any (not skull) target with 2 arcane blasts before I need to switch target, where if I’d been on my bear and one dps attacks a random target (not skull) I’d have to taunt and focus on that mob a bit.

In short, it’s manageble (though I do wonder about Heroics, in normal dungeons losing aggro for a bit doesn’t really matter), but it’s no where near the other tanking classes. But honestly I don’t mind if they take a few weeks before fixing this… if they take their time, we’ll get used to it, then after the fix we’ll feel like AoE Gods ;-)

The problem is certain dungeon fights will spawn waves of adds that Reversion swipes at, they ignore him and I pull aggro from healing. Like the final boss in Stonecore. Yeah those are to some extent not designed to be tanked but it’s frustrating when they run straight at me. Or in Halls of Origination there’s a set of trash that spawn half a dozen little lashers that ignore swipe, run over and attack someone else who may not even have been AOEing. All things we can handle, but all annoying. That said we ran an instance last night and now that we know what’s going on it’s much easier. Of course Reversion was managing before but now that he knows exactly what is wrong he can expect it.

I think some of those have not agro table…. it is hard to say though. I keep seeing things like the ones you mention, that ignore my agro and go for people, and I have to wonder if they have a mechanic that causes that or if it is the pathetic bear aoe just getting ignored.

Yeah no kidding. Last night we did GB and I did not really have any issues. Now that I have firmly identified the problem I don’t get surprised by things not doing the level of agro I expect. Once they buff us back, even a little, things will feel great.

Still, the next time a pally tells me how utterly easy these new ones are to tank… grrrr

“Like the final boss in Stonecore” – haha, yea tell me about that one. I was convinced the adds ignored aggro and had a heavy discussion about them before the pull yesterday.

“Halls of Origination there’s a set of trash that spawn half a dozen little lashers that ignore swipe” – haven’t been there yet, trying it tonight if I have time.

“I don’t get surprised by things not doing the level of agro I expect” – Me neither, I was suspecting something was up, but until I read this (and the links to the us forums) I didn’t know swipe was bugged. In dutch they say a warned man counts for two, so I guess my guild will have two bears in their party tonight! *roar*